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Valerie E. Stahl

Assistant Professor of City Planning, San Diego State University
Chapter Member: San Diego SSN
Areas of Expertise:

Connect with Valerie

About Valerie

Stahl's mixed-methods research focuses on three key areas of urban planning and policy: public and affordable housing, community engagement, and zoning. She observes these issues through the lens of racial and economic (in)justice in planning, primarily focusing on planning processes in neighborhoods that are facing pressures of austerity, gentrification, and displacement. The goal of her work is to promote just and equitable urban development through policy-relevant and community-centered research.

Contributions

The Rent’s Too Goddamned High

In the News

Quoted by Kori Suzuki in "South Bay’s Alvarez Hopes New Law Will Boost Affordable Housing Across California," KPBS News, October 25, 2023.
Opinion: "Welcome to Blackstone U.S.A.," Valerie E. Stahl, Tablet Magazine, July 4, 2023.
Quoted by Jared Kofsky & Maia Rosenfeld in "'I Just Cry': Families Spend Years on Subsidized Housing Waiting Lists," ABC News, May 8, 2023.
Quoted by Jared Kofsky & Maia Rosenfeld in "‘A Steady Deterioration’: US Communities Face a Public Housing Crisis," ABC News, May 4, 2023.
Opinion: "Ben Carson Is an Insult to HUD," Valerie E. Stahl, Slate Magazine, January 11, 2017.

Publications

"Housing Publics: Situated Resistance to Public Housing Redevelopment in New York City Under Racial Capitalism" Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space (2023).

Examines resistance to a public housing redevelopment process in New York City. Finds that while the housing authority and residents had the same objective of preserving existing public housing, their desired paths to achieving that goal dramatically differed.

"Zoning: A Guide for 21st-Century Planning" (edited with Elliott Sclar, Bernadette Baird-Zars, and Lauren Ames Fischer) (Routledge, 2020).

Examines zoning as both a technical tool and a politicized regulatory mechanism, focusing on its implications for urban equity and sustainability. Approaches zoning from a social science and planning perspective in order to engage students of urban planning, policy, and design with several key questions relevant to the realities of zoning and land regulation they encounter in practice.